William James

Great Men and their Environment. A truly remarkable essay. It anticipates the key points of Richard Dawkin's idea of ``memes,'' and uses them to show the futility of attempts by Herbert Spencer and his followers to discover predictive ``laws of history.'' (Mutatis mutandis, it also cuts the foundations out from Marx and his progeny.) Perhaps most astonishing is that this was published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1880.